A Solar Winter (Into the Dark Post-Apocalyptic EMP Thriller Book 4) Read online

  A Solar Winter

  Into the Dark Post-Apocalyptic EMP Thriller: Book Four

  Ryan Casey

  Contents

  Bonus Content

  A Solar Winter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

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  A Solar Winter

  Into the Dark: Book Four

  Chapter One

  Emma walked down the long, lonely road, and wondered if she’d find anyone nice ever again.

  It was light, but not bright like it was in summer. She liked summer. Even when things were bad, the sun had a way of making her feel better, reminding her of times she used to go on holiday with Mum and Dad, or up to her nana and granddad’s caravan in Scotland.

  They were good days. They were the days she remembered most. Never winter. Not even Christmas, which she knew was weird for a kid of fourteen. Christmas was always the best time of year for everyone else in her class at school. She always preferred her summer holidays.

  But this was different.

  Her dislike of winter… it was rooted in something else, now.

  And that was the fact that the power had been out for a long time.

  And the snow was falling.

  Heavily.

  She traipsed through the snow, struggling to keep to her feet. The snow felt bitter cold as it seeped through the sides of her torn shoes. She was freezing, shivering all over, even though she was wrapped in a thick arctic parka. It was the nights that did it—the nights outside, sleeping by the side of the road, waking up with snot frozen to her upper lip, not wanting to move but at the same time knowing she had to move if she wanted to survive.

  She saw a lot of people lying by the sides of the roads. A lot of people who had been pushing on, like her, but who had given up and lost the battle with the cold.

  She knew that if she gave up, if she sat back and allowed herself to get too comfortable in the snow, it wasn’t long before she’d be dead too.

  Her stomach groaned, but she wasn’t hungry. She felt sick. Sometimes she went days without a single bit of food. She’d all but wasted away completely. And that was even though she’d been staying with a group for the last couple of months. And before that, another group.

  But both of them had fallen.

  Both of them had torn themselves apart from the inside.

  Everything had changed after that nasty foreign soldier put the gun to her dad’s head and shot him, right by Emma’s side.

  She tightened her grip on the rifle he’d given her. The one she’d sworn to kill that man with, one day. People had tried to take it off her. She didn’t have any ammo left. But still, she felt stronger with it. It reminded her what’d happened to her dad. And it reminded her what she’d do if she ever came across the man who killed him.

  But back to the world she’d been living in. It was hard, establishing new order. It wasn’t easy for anyone to take the role of a leader and try to steer a group towards peace and unity.

  Emma had seen that.

  But for the last two weeks, she’d been on her own.

  She looked at the road ahead. She was in a small town. Abandoned cars. Smashed windows. The usual sights.

  In the early days, walking through a town wasn’t a good idea. There were looters, then rioters, then groups who were holding down the towns for themselves, establishing twisted communities of their own.

  But now they were just as safe—or as dangerous—as the surrounding woods and countryside. The looters had nothing to loot. The rioters had nothing to riot about. And the groups who were holding the towns down for themselves had got so attached to them that they’d fallen behind in learning key survival and adaptation skills.

  So Emma barely even looked left or right at the buildings as she walked through the town, snow seeping even further through her torn shoes and her ripped, baggy jeans.

  She just kept her focus ahead and shivered.

  She stopped at the end of the street. Scooped up some of the snow. It was falling heavily, and there was a covering of about six inches on the ground now. She flicked her lighter and melted it in a flask, then drank it. She found she got more out of it when the snow was melted rather than just eating it. It didn’t seem to quench her thirst quite as much.

  She’d had to find a few ways of surviving on her own out here. Tricks that she’d learned from the groups she’d been staying with. Ways of filtering water. Methods of catching animals. But mostly it was a struggle of days without food before luckily straying upon an animal caught in someone’s pre-set trap. Or a house that had been abandoned, a lucky bit of food still left in those rapidly dwindling supplies.

  She got up again, started walking on. She didn’t know where she was going exactly; she was just hoping. Hoping she’d find a group. A good group.

  And hoping she wouldn’t bump into the kind of people who’d killed her parents right in front of her.

  She remembered hugging her dad as those foreign soldiers stood around them. She remembered squeezing him tight, then hearing the blast—the blast that blew bits of him over her face.

  She remembered the way that man had crouched down, put the gun into her hands and told her to warn other people about them.

  But Emma hadn’t done that.

  Instead, she’d had another thing in mind. Another goal.

  She wanted to find that man.

  She wanted to make him pay for what he’d done, one way or another.

  She knew he could be miles away. She knew he might not even be in the country anymore. She knew he’d probably be dead—like the rest of the people who’d walked this country in the early days.

  She’d heard the talk of how it looked like a few foreign armies had come in to try and claim the territory for themselves. But then things had happened. Things had gone wrong. What looked like an initial EMP blast hadn’t actually just been one blast—it was continuous activity, or at least that’s what she’d heard from the grown-ups who always went on about it anyway. Activity affecting the climates. Somebody even said something about a permanent
winter, or the poles shifting, or something like that.

  The truth was, they didn’t know. Emma didn’t know. Nobody knew.

  All they had was the now.

  And now, it was winter, it was cold, and survival was getting harder and harder as the days got shorter.

  She looked to her right into the front garden of a bungalow, and her stomach sank.

  There was a dog lying there. It looked like it’d frozen in the cold. It was totally still, totally at peace.

  Emma felt sadness inside. She used to have a dog called Alfie. He was a little Border, who she loved very much.

  But Alfie had died a few weeks before the EMP.

  She wished he was here by her side.

  She wished she had a friend.

  She wanted to leave this poor dog to rest.

  But at the same time, animal instinct was taking over.

  At the same time, she knew she had to eat.

  And everything was food now.

  She walked over to the dog. Crouched over it. She pulled out her knife, tapped its side.

  It was cold. But there was still warmth underneath.

  It’d only died recently.

  Emma swallowed a lump in her throat. She felt sad for this dog. It’d had a nice life, then the EMP struck and changed everything.

  It’d fought. It’d survived all this time.

  And in the end, it became the same thing as everyone when they died.

  Food.

  She moved the knife further towards the dog. Her heart raced. She didn’t want to do this. She’d done it before, and she could never get those images out of her head; she could never un-remember the things she’d done—the things she’d had to do—to survive.

  But she knew she had to eat.

  She pushed the knife against the side of the dog and went to press down, hard.

  Then she heard the footsteps.

  She turned around. Reactions triggered, heightened ever since the start of this new world.

  She didn’t see anyone. Not at first.

  She went to turn back to the dog, to get back to what she had to do, when she heard the footsteps again.

  And this time, when she turned around, she saw them.

  She saw her.

  “Hey,” the person said.

  She wasn’t alone anymore.

  Chapter Two

  Mike sprinted through the thick snow the moment he heard the cry.

  It was late afternoon. The hunting and scouting group had been out for a long time, far longer than they were supposed to be. It’d been weeks now, and everyone back at Grey Lodge had been on tenterhooks about their potential return—made even worse by the fact another group had gone missing a while back. It was snowing heavily, but that wasn’t abnormal anymore. It was reality. The new reality that wasn’t even so new anymore.

  The winter had hit early, the snow falling in November and the cold arriving even earlier than that. Sure, Mike had lost sense of the days—all of them had lost sense of the exact day it was. But he knew from estimations that the snow had fallen early, and the winter had been constant. A constant winter, harsh in a way he’d never seen it before.

  He could only conclude the weather changing had something to do with the EMP, and that there really had been some kind of solar event after all.

  Or perhaps some foreign group was using advanced weather manipulation technology to rein hell on the citizens of this country.

  Nobody really knew.

  Whatever the case, winter made everything difficult.

  Which was why alarm bells rang when he heard the cry.

  He crunched through the snow. Grey Lodge was behind him. He’d been there for a few months now, helping with the everyday running of the place. They’d formed bonds with communities nearby—did trade with farmers, with other small communities, that sort of thing. They had a few doctors on board, which meant they could provide medical services, but mostly it was just a place of comfort and counsel.

  It wasn’t perfect. But it was something.

  The cry echoed through the woods again.

  Mike stalled when he saw the woods ahead. His heart raced. He always had the same reaction whenever he reached wooded areas like this. It brought back too many memories. Memories of the early days. Memories of the pain, of the loss.

  Memories of the day he’d lost his daughter, Holly.

  He saw it replaying in his mind for what must be the millionth time.

  The way he’d seen the wounded man lying on the forest floor.

  The way he’d taken his attention from Holly, just for a moment.

  The way he’d heard her scream.

  He looked over his shoulder in the present day, instinctively more than anything. He hoped he’d see her there. Hoped he’d find a chance to go after her, to stop her disappearing, to stop her slipping away from him once again.

  But all he saw was snow.

  He reached into his pocket. Pulled out her ring. Then held it, tight.

  Wherever she was out there, he hoped she was okay.

  He heard the cry ahead of him again, and he knew he couldn’t waste any more time.

  He ran into the woods, between the trees. He could tell that the cry was coming from a guy. If he could place a bet, he’d put it on Fred. Fred had been with the hunting party who went missing weeks ago. He wasn’t all that competent—he was pretty much surviving on the generosity and competence of others, which wasn’t an ideal situation in a world that relied on everyone pulling together.

  But they didn’t leave people behind anymore. They didn’t let people fall. Mike knew he’d had his spell of distrust. He knew he’d had his moments where he’d been unable to trust anyone but his inner circle. And he’d done horrible things in the name of self-preservation.

  But things had changed, now.

  He had changed.

  Everyone deserved a chance to prove they were better than they first appeared.

  He got further inside the woods when he realised he was disoriented. He hadn’t heard the cry for a while. And that worried him. It took him back again to when Holly went missing.

  If the cry had stopped, did that mean there was someone out here?

  Or did that mean that the person had died already?

  He tried to take a few deep breaths, tried to steady his thoughts. He was still paranoid about outside groups even though he rarely bumped into them anymore. And those he did bump into were usually good people who were surviving in similar ways to him and the rest of his group back at his base. They formed alliances. Shared information. Traded.

  It was a tough world, but it was a good world.

  A world that had eroded a lot of his cynicism.

  Just a world with an uncertain lifespan.

  He was about to take a right when he heard the cry to his left.

  Close by.

  He stopped. Turned around. Walked slowly in the direction of the cry.

  “Fred?” he called. “It’s Mike. Is that you?”

  Nothing.

  Which made him more cautious, more uncertain.

  He stepped closer towards the cry, closer towards whoever had fallen. Right up to an evergreen bush, which he knew there was something behind.

  “Fred?”

  And then a hand shot out and grabbed his ankle.

  He kicked out, staggered back. He lifted his knife and went to attack out of instinct more than anything.

  But then he stopped.

  He saw who was grabbing him.

  “Fred,” he said.

  Fred was on his back. He looked like he’d fallen—badly.

  But then Mike saw the blood seeping through the snow, and he realised something else was going on here.

  “What’ve you gone and done, Fred?”

  “Leg,” he said, gasping his words. “My—my leg.”

  Mike wiped some of the snow away from Fred’s leg, blood clinging to his hands.

  And when he’d moved it away, he saw what had happened, and another
flashback hit him at once.

  There was a trap wrapped around Fred’s leg. It was a thick bear trap, no doubt about it. Its teeth were deep in Fred’s shin. The bones in his leg had snapped, crushed under the weight and force. He was trapped.

  Mike remembered being caught in a fox trap, and the pain he’d felt. But it was nothing like this. Someone had obviously laid it before the snow had come… or perhaps not. Perhaps they’d buried it in the snow on purpose.

  Mike didn’t know.

  He just got the sense that someone was close by.

  That someone was watching.

  Probably just imagining things.

  “Please,” Fred gasped. “Help—help me. Please.”

  Mike felt sick just looking at Fred’s leg. But he knew if he didn’t help him fast, he was going to bleed out.

  “You’re going to have to keep really calm,” Mike said. “This… this isn’t going to be nice.”

  Mike grabbed the sides of the bear trap.

  The second he applied even the slightest bit of force, Fred screamed.

  Mike stopped. Moving the trap had only made the bleeding worse. This wasn’t going to work, not like this.

  He looked around for something to use to ease the pain or to make removing the trap easier, or even just to cover the wound for the time being.

  When he looked back, he saw that the light in Fred’s eyes had faded.

  He tapped the side of his face. Shook him. Performed CPR, tried to bring him back to life. Because he couldn’t lose him. They couldn’t lose someone else.